SYNOPSIS

A high-performance file system designed for clusters.

DESCRIPTION

Lustre®
is a high-performance, massively-scalable, POSIX-compliant network file system
designed for the world's largest high-performance compute clusters. Lustre
is under active development from Sun Microsystems (http://www.lustre.org).

Lustre filesystems are made up of multiple services typically distributed
across multiple nodes. Lustre clients can contact these server nodes over
multiple high-speed network fabrics via LNET, the Lustre NETworking
system. Clients then present the filesystem at a mount point to userspace.

A filesystem is comprised of a
MDT
, MetaData Target, which stores directory and file meta-information such as
file ownership, timestamps, access permissions, etc, and a
series of
OSTs
, Object Storage Targets, which hold the file data in one or more objects.
There is typically not a 1:1 mapping of OST objects and what is presented
as a file on a Lustre client.

Lustre and LNET are implemented as a series of kernel modules, for both
servers and clients. LNET networks are defined in the modprobe.conf file on
all nodes. Lustre is started on the clients and servers using the
mount(8)
command.